New Year’s Resolutions? Consider Gaming Goals

As the New Year gets underway, there’s a lot of talk about resolutions and goals for the coming year, but has anyone asked you about you gaming goals for the year?

I know, the idea of gaming goals might seem a bit odd. After all, gaming is for fun, so why would I need goals, right?

Well, the truth of the matter is that I, like most people I know, tend to get involved in day-to-day life, drama, work and such and forget the things I really want to do, so this year, I made a list of gaming goals for the year. They are meant to encourage me to do more of the things I love.

My list has just three individual goals, but yours could have as many as you want. Maybe this is the year you want to stretch yourself and LARP for the first time. Maybe you want to run a game at a convention or maybe you just want to play in a regular campaign. Whatever your gaming goals might be, now’s the time to start planning them out. Just like any other goal, gaming goals should be specific, measurable and attainable.

To give you a jumping off point, I’ll share mine.

Goal 1: Play one new game per week.

Okay, so this is recycled from last year.

We have tons of board games that we bought on sale, got through a Kickstarter or got given. We probably don’t have enough games to do a new one each week, but I have friends who own games I’ve never played so I can hit them up for help.

The purpose of this goal is multi-fold. First, we have a lot of games we’ve never played. We might be missing out on some really good ones. Second, even gamers can get in a rut. Sure, we love Zombicide and Dead of Winter, but if that’s all we ever play how will we know what else is great. Third, when we find we don’t love a game, we can pass it on to someone else who might love it and free up space in the game room.

Goal 2: Finish my terrain projects.

In 2015, my husband started painting miniatures again and I started painting and constructing terrain. I got a lot of terrain projects on Black Friday that year and I still have a lot of them to finish up. To be specific, measurable and attainable this goal has to be divided out, so specifically my goal is to finish the Warhammer Garden of Morr by the end of January, my swamp terrain by the end of February and the Plasticraft circus terrain in March.

After March, I’ll evaluate how I’m doing so far and add the next three projects to the list. One of my big goals for the summer is to design and build a miniatures board that is Nightmare Before Christmas themed, but before I get to that I have to build the sets I have already started.

Getting these done will make meeting goal three that much more fun.

Goal 3; Play Malifaux and Warmachine/Hordes at least twice a month.

The reason Thor is painting miniatures and I’m making terrain are for two of our favorite games: Malifaux and Warmachine/Hordes. Both are tabletop miniatures games and take a couple hours each to set up the terrain, play the game and break it down again. We love the games, but we often default to doing something other than playing them because of the prep time involved. The problem with that is the only way to enjoy the game is to play it and playing it more frequently means it gets faster to play. As a rule, the more familiar you are with a game, the faster you can play it.

So we’ve made this a joint goal to play them more often. But more often isn’t definitive, so I’m adding a time frame.

The best thing about gaming goals is there is no real penalty for not succeeding. But there is a huge reward for making those goals happen.